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So, what is AI personalisation? How does it reduce the strain on marketeers? And how can organisations harness machine capabilities to maximise ROI?
Customers crave personalisation. Not only does it provide a more relevant online experience, but it removes all those irritating messages advertising irrelevant products. However, personalisation can be an overwhelming and time-consuming task for marketers. But artificial intelligence can simplify this and, in fact, can make it easier to understand consumers and generate personalised marketing campaigns than ever before.
With many companies looking to transform digitally, businesses need to be prepared to adapt and evolve or risk falling behind. Today digitally savvy businesses are looking to machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to advance their organisations.
Artificial intelligence is defined as the ability of a computer to carry out tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. AI personalisation is, therefore, the utilisation of machine algorithms to identify and deliver valuable information specifically tailored to the unique traits of the end-user.
Personalisation has always been at the heart of Sitecore’s capability. However, the release of Sitecore 9 was a pivotal point for AI personalisation, with the introduction of Sitecore Cortex. Sitecore Cortex is the platform’s advanced marketing toolset that uses AI and machine learning to drive marketing outcomes. The personalisation service driven by Microsoft Azure automatically recognises website visitor trends, defines customer segments and modifies web page elements to deliver personalised digital experiences.
The task of analysing and understanding the copious amounts of data coming from website activity puts considerable strain on digital marketers. They need to manually identify the different types of customer; understand how and for what purpose they navigate the website in addition to carrying out A/B tests on high traffic pages. All these jobs take up a HUGE amount of the marketer’s time and effort.
Marketers have already benefited from Sitecore personalisation, path analyser and A/B testing but these tools still require significant human effort to be successful. Sitecore’s AI machine algorithm takes further pressure off marketing teams. Great right? Eventually, once AI can identify which content is contributing to ‘successful’ visits, it can automatically start showing more of that content. Rather than requiring a marketer to manually identify a persona, set up the page and personalisation rule, users will benefit from seeing content aimed specifically at them yielding a greater ROI, without any involvement from a website editor. AI can also be used to identify any gaps, such as content that is failing to deliver with all segments, which marketers now have the extra time to address.
Sitecore Auto Personalisation also provides marketing teams with a dashboard that shows exactly what AI is doing and why it makes the decisions it makes. For example, what visitors’ attributes are most influential, why visitors have been grouped into certain audience segments and how content that resonates most with each segment was selected.
At the Sitecore Symposium this year, Sitecore’s Executive Vice President of Product Management emphasised the clear benefits of AI auto personalisation as:
- Increased ROI
- Increased productivity
- Deeper insights into customer behaviour via the segment analytics suite
Each new version of Sitecore has additional tools, features and functionality. To benefit from Sitecore AI Auto Personalisation, you need to be using Sitecore 9.0 or above. So, if you are still using an earlier version, this may be the perfect time and reason for an upgrade.
If you think your organisation would benefit from AI personalisation and machine learning capabilities, look no further. Here at ClerksWell, we have the experience and knowledge to guide and advise you through the upgrade process – get in touch today to talk about a Sitecore upgrade or Sitecore AI!
Also, check out our previous Sitecore blogs 'Sitecore vs Kentico' and 'Why Personalisation Matters (and how Sitecore can help!).'
